Overview

Fund-raising or volunteering opportunities are often associated with social responsibilities and they create a positive impact on both people who are involved and people who are benefitted. This is one of the reason why people like to work for non-profit organizations, but due to evolving lifestyle choices, people are finding difficult to accommodate time for philanthropic cause. Through this project, I have tried to explore how hobbies can be a way in for the people to draw them back to work and raise funds for philanthropic causes.

Predispositions

To get started with, and guide my design process. I have made this three predispositions.
- Most of the people have desire to do volunteer work and donate or raise funds for philanthropic cause.
- Times have changed now, with more lifestyle choices people find it challenging to accommodate time to work for a philanthropic cause.
- Knowingly or unknowingly most of the people passionately pursue hobbies for years and develop skills which required in the process.

Research

Primanry research
Semi-structured interviews were conducted in two phases, in the first phase, I have interviewed volunteers and people who run non-profit organizations. This greatly helped me to know motivations and goals of non-profit organizations, and understand how they run programs, attract volunteers and serve their core constituents. In the second phase, I have conducted interviews with hobbyist, both amateur and professional photographers. This helped me to list differences between volunteering work and hobbies. Some of the key aspects of my final design such as learning, developing skills, intrinsic values of art works, and recognition are derived from synthesis of interviews with photographers.

Secondary research
Literature review and research collections constitutes my secondary research. Through literature review, I have studied how non-profits organizations are adopting to new technologies and carrying out organization initiatives, and gained more insights on motivations behind volunteering work, goals of various non-profit organizations. Next, my research collections constitutes of web applications which follow models such as micro-financing, crowd-funding, volunteer-match programs and hobby based volunteering. Analyzing these models guided me to construct an effective design system for my design concepts.

Insights

These are some of the insights gained from synthesis of primary and secondary research.
1. Intrinsic values: People value photographs, it reminds their past moments, and they like to protect them for the coming generations.
2. Recognition: Acts as positive reinforcements and motivate hobbyist to produce more art works.
3. Social activity: Gives an opportunity to learn and improve skills from others.
4. To be a successful volunteer, people have to involve both intellectually and emotionally in a volunteering activity.


5. Volunteering opportunities are not intrinsically as motivated as hobbies, the reason being is over a period of time there is no skill development involved in volunteering work.


Concepts

Design concepts were generated from the research insights, and myhobbies is one of the concept which I chose work further. Myhobbies: A marketplace for a hobbyist to sell art works and run social campaigns of his interests either individually or in a group.

Myhobbies

Prototypes

Prototypes were build for myhobbies design concept in two phases. In the first phase behavioral prototypes were developed for hobbyist profile, wireframes for both marketplace and social campaign pages were created. Marketplace page helps hobbyist to raise funds by selling his art works. Through social campaign page, a hobbyists can collaborate and work for a social cause, the money raised in the process is donated to non-profit organizations. Both the pages were developed using axure tool in order to evaluate rapidly with hobbyist. In the second phase, appearance prototypes were designed based on the received feedback, these are high fidelity prototypes which resemble final web application. The images shown here are appearance prototypes of social campaign page run by a hobbyist, home page shows the key features, activity page shows recent updates on social campaigns and marketplace.

Social Campaign page

Marketplace page

Actvity page

Future Strategies

In my next steps, in order to successfully include other hobbies within the system, I am developing templates which would assist hobbyist to set up marketplace and campaigns.

New on-boarding process for non-profit organizations and develop strategies to keep donors active on social campaigns.

Art works and resources are different for different hobbies, therefore it is necessary to have few revenue models for a hobbyist to chose from.

DELIVERABLES

Design Document
Visual Designs
Axure Prototypes

PROJECT CATEGORY

User research
Interaction design

METHODS

Qualitative Inteviews
Data flow diagrams
Usability evaluation

TOOLS

Sketching
Photoshop
Axure pro
Indesign

@ 2014, Vamsi Chaitanya. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.